Education and Race - an Alternative View

This article, which The Salisbury Review published in 1984, cost Ray Honeyford his job as a head teacher. For speaking the truth, he was subjected to a long, bitter campaign, including death threats and other forms of persecution, orchestrated by an assortment of vehement idealogues. Twenty-two years on, the Review says that it "salutes Mr Honeyford's courage and intellectual integrity, which has been so clearly vindicated by recent events". Here, with the magazine's permission, we exclusively republish Mr Honeyford's observations:

The issues and problems of our multi racial inner cities are frequently thrown into sharp relief for me. As the head teacher of a school in the middle of a predominantly Asian area, I am often witness to scenes which have the raw feel of reality and the recipient of vehement criticism, whenever I question some of the current educational orthodoxies connected with race.

It is very difficult to write honestly and openly of my experiences, and the reflections they evoke, since the race relations lobby is extremely powerful in the state education service. The propaganda generated by multi racial zealots is now augmented by a growing bureaucracy of race in local authorities. And this makes freedom of speech difficult to maintain.

By exploiting the enormous tolerance traditional in this country, the race lobby has so managed to induce and maintain feelings of guilt in the well disposed majority, that decent people are not only afraid of voicing certain thoughts, they are uncertain even of their right to think those thoughts. They are intimidated not only by their fear of giving offence by voicing their own reasonable concerns about the inner cities, but by the necessity of conducting the debate in a language which is dishonest.

The term 'racism', for instance, functions not as a word with which to create insight, but as a slogan designed to suppress constructive thought. It conflates prejudice and discrimination, and thereby denies a crucial conceptual distinction. It is the icon word of those committed to the race game. And they apply it with the same sort of mindless zeal as the inquisitors voiced 'heretic' or Senator McCarthy spat out 'Commie'.

The word 'black' has been perverted. Every non white is now, officially, 'black', be he Indian, Pakistani or Vietnamese. This gross and offensive dichotomy has an obvious purpose: the creation of an atmosphere of anti white solidarity. To suppress and distort the enormous variations within races which I every day observe by using language in this way is an outrage to all decent people whatever their skin colour.

And there are other distortions: race riots are described by the politically motivated as 'uprisings', and by a Lord of Appeal as a 'superb and healthy catalyst for the British people' and the police blamed for the behaviour of violent thugs; rather like the patient blaming the doctor because he has a cold in the head.

'Cultural enrichment' is the approved term for the West Indian's right to create an ear splitting cacophony for most of the night to the detriment of his neighbour's sanity, or for the Notting Hill Festival whose success or failure is judged by the level of street crime which accompanies it.

At the schools' level the term refers to such things as the Muslim parent's insistence on banning his daughter from drama, dance and sport, i.e. imposing a purdah mentality in schools committed to the principle of sexual equality; and the determined efforts of misguided radical teachers to place such as the following alongside the works of Shakespeare and Wordsworth:

No one, of course, is allowed to describe first generation black or coloured immigrants as 'immigrants' though no other collective noun exists. In the courts it has been revealed that we now have laws on the statute book which insist that Sikhism is a race, which, as three distinguished lords of appeal were able to demonstrate, contradicts the best available dictionary definitions.

We have, therefore, officially perverted words to such a degree that it would be perfectly reasonable in law to describe a member of the Church of England or the Labour Party as a member of an ethnic group, a manifest absurdity. (It is worth noting that in his judgement of this case, Lord Justice Kerr commented of The Commission for Racial Equality, 'The commission seemed to have created discord where there had been none before,' a view, I suspect, which is shared by the vast majority of the public with regard to most of the C.R.E.'s activities.)

We in the schools are also enjoined to believe that creole, pidgin and other non standard variants have the same power, subtlety and capacity for expressing five shades of meaning, and for tolerating uncertainty, ambiguity and irony as standard English. A generation of cultural relativists in the field of linguistics has managed to impose on the schools the mindless slogan 'All languages are equally good' - a myth recently and convincingly demolished by Professor John Honey in The Language Trap, a monograph published by the National Council for Educational Standards.

Those of us working in Asian areas are encouraged, officially, to 'celebrate linguistic diversity', ie applaud the rapidly mounting linguistic confusion in those growing number of inner city schools in which British born Asian children begin their mastery of English by being taught in Urdu.

In Politics and the English Language George Orwell said, 'Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an impression of solidity to pure wind.' Race speak is the language of a politics committed to that sort of deceit. There is little hope of our coming to terms with the monumental significance for our future of New Commonwealth and Pakistani immigration until we invent a language by means of which doubts, fears and aspirations can be expressed openly and honestly.

What, in the meantime, can one do? In the absence of the coinage of honest discourse, one can perhaps make a start by reporting and commenting on one's everyday experiences. I recall, for instance, the meeting called to explain to Asian parents the importance of regular school attendance for their offspring's future. A very high proportion of Asian immigrants have a habit of sending children to the Indian sub continent during term time with obvious, deleterious educational consequences. Not only is the practice inadvisable, it is almost certainly illegal though no local education authority has had the courage to bring a test case, and the Department of Education and Science turns a blind eye.

After much badgering from the schools, the local authority had agreed try to impose on brown parents the same obligations it demanded from white and black parents with regard to school attendance. Against all normal expectations the meeting was packed. There had obviously been a local 'three line whip' from the Pakistani leadership. It quickly became evident that what had been proposed as an act of reconciliation, based on the school's concern for the child, was to descend into a noisy and unseemly demonstration of sectarian bitterness.

The hysterical political temperament of the Indian sub continent became evident an extraordinary sight in an English School Hall. There was much shouting and fist waving. The local authority was accused of 'racism'; the chairman insulted. One anglicised Asian stood near the door and, at regular intervals, shouted 'bullshit' at the chair. The disorder was orchestrated. Questions were always preceded by a nod from a Muslim leader. A half-educated and volatile Sikh usurped the privileges of the chair by deciding who was to speak.

The confusion was made worse by the delays occasioned by the need for interpreting many of the audience had no English though there have been freely available English classes in the area for at least a decade. I raised my hand to speak several times but was ignored. The atmosphere was highly charged and threatening. I left before the end, bitterly disappointed.

Needless to say, the absenteeism of Asian pupils abroad continues. The authorities have simply given up. And I am left with the ethically indefensible task of complying with a school attendance policy which is determined not, as the law requires, on the basis of individual parental responsibility but by the parent's country of origin a blatant and officially sanctioned policy of racial discrimination.

My disappointment was compounded by a sense of irony. These people, who now so vehemently accused the authorities of denying them a right which, in reality was a privilege no other parents enjoyed, and no other group of immigrants had contemplated claiming these same people enjoyed rights, privileges and aspirations unheard of in their country of origin.

Pakistan is a country which cannot cope with democracy; under martial law since 1977, it is ruled by a military tyrant who, in the opinion of at least half his countrymen, had his predecessor judicially murdered. A country, moreover, which, despite disproportionate western aid because of its important strategic position, remains for most of its people obstinately backward.

Corruption at every level combines with unspeakable treatment not only of criminals, but of those who dare to question Islamic orthodoxy as interpreted by a despot. Even as I write, wounded dissidents are chained to hospital beds awaiting their fate.

Pakistan, too, is the heroin capital of the world. (A fact which is now reflected in the drug problems of English cities with Asian populations.) It is not surprising that such a country loses more of its citizens voluntarily to other countries than any state on earth. How could the denizens of such a country so wildly and implacably resent the simple British requirement for all parents to send children to school regularly?

It was this reflection which caused me, perhaps for the first time, to understand why so many fundamentally decent people harbour feelings of resentment. I realised, too, how little the cant term 'racism' explains. In truth, I was affronted by what I had seen in my own school hall.

Again, I recall the reaction to an article I published recently in The Times Educational Supplement. I simply attempted to question the conceptual soundness of the ideas which comprise the term 'multi racial education'. My main argument was that the fashionable way of explaining comparative black pupil failure in British schools as a function of teacher prejudice and an alien curriculum was almost certainly bogus. There is not a scrap of evidence to support such a belief. The roots of black educational failure are, in reality, located in West Indian family structure and values, and the work of misguided radical teachers whose motives are basically political.

Within days, The Caribbean Times carried a long letter from a group of black activists known as 'The Harringay Black Pressure Group on Education'. This letter confirmed my belief that much of the pressure for a multi racial curriculum comes from the vehement, radical left of black organisations. Its tone is strident, its contents poorly argued, its style sub standard; but the main thrust of its argument accords well with official policy edicts now being imposed on the schools by several local education authorities a process which is certain to be accelerated when the impending Swarm Committee report is published.

The basic intention of the authors of the letter is to intimidate. It is also defamatory, and highly likely to damage me professionally. But redress would be difficult, since no one has had the courage to sign the letter. How do you sue a collective? Amongst other things I am accused of the sins of being white and middle class. Inevitably I am a 'blatant racist'. I should be immediately sacked and a public investigation carried out into how I run my school. I am even accused of trying to deprive negroes of their welfare benefits.

The totalitarian nature of the writers' mentalities may be judged from the following quotation: 'All teachers, especially those like Mr Honeyford, should be compelled to attend massive [sic] in service training courses to bring them up to date with modern education theory, and practice, and to purge them of their racist outlook and ideology. Teachers who refuse to adapt their teaching and go on in service training courses should be redeployed or retired off [sic] early. School books with a racist content ... should be scrapped. Racist teachers should be dismissed.'

Of such libellous and mindless bombast is the rhetoric of multi racialising composed. Of course it might be objected that such a mentality is not representative. That the Harringay Black teachers are simply the disreputable, unacceptable face of the race industry, of which the Commission for Racial Equality is the acceptable front.

But such extremism is becoming the norm. I was recently told by an educational mandarin that, unless I attended a 'racism awareness workshop' arranged by the local authority, I would be deprived of the right to be involved the appointment of staff to my school.

Consider, too, the following extract from Black Britain by Chris Mullard: 'Already we have started to rebel, to kick out against our jailers ... As more black Britons leave school disgruntled, as more black immigrants discard their yoke of humility, the ultimate confrontation will become clearer... Blacks will fight with pressure, leaflets, campaigns, demonstrations, fists and scorching resentment which, when peaceful means fail, will explode into street fighting, urban guerrilla warfare, looting, burning and rioting'.

Now the writer of that is not some insignificant devotee of Marcuse spitting out his hatred of the white establishment. He is, in fact, a lecturer in education in the University of London. As such he is accorded expert status. He is influential in the training of teachers, and his views are respected by local education authorities.

More recently, I published a simple report on my contact with Asian parents in a typical school week. The piece contained many positive references to Asian values. But I was immediately and intemperately attacked by a dedicated multi racialist who publicly accused me of being prejudiced, of fabricating the evidence, and of using phrases which 'must give cause for concern'; and my 'strategy' (whatever that means) was condemned as being 'ignorant and counter productive'.

It is typical of the response to honest discussion of those teachers who have eagerly embraced the career enhancing possibilities of the new multi racial orthodoxy in schools. Such people never proceed through rational argument, but rather by the tactic of impugning others' good will. At no point in all this sound and fury does the plight of those white children who constitute the 'Ethnic minority' in a growing number of inner city schools merit even a mention. Yet their educational 'disadvantage' is now confirmed.

It is no more than common sense, that if a school contains a disproportionate number of children for whom English is a second language (true of all Asian children, even those born here), or children from homes where educational ambition and the values to support it are conspicuously absent (i.e. the vast majority of West Indian homes a disproportionate number of which are fatherless) then academic standards are bound to suffer.

This intuition is supported by the findings of the Department of Education and Science Assessment of Performance Unit on primary school English; and there is suggestive evidence in the National Council for Educational Standards' report Standards in English Schools. The absence of concern for the rights of this group of parents is due to three factors: they are overwhelmingly lower working class with little ability to articulate their social and educational anxieties; they have, so far, failed to produce a pressure group generating appropriate propaganda; and unlike non white children they have no government quango to plead their cause.

These experiences I here report are the tip of an iceberg. Yet they seem to me important since they point up the real educational consequences of the general acceptance of the notion that multi racial inner cities are not only inevitable but, in some sense, desirable.

Specifically, they raise for policy makers and public opinion the question of how the following unique factors now operating in our inner cities can be reconciled to produce that integrated, harmonious society we all affect to cherish:

- A growing number of Asians whose aim is to preserve as intact as possible the values and attitudes of the Indian sub continent within a framework of British social and political privilege, ie to produce Asian ghettoes.

- An influential group of black intellectuals of aggressive disposition, who know little of the British traditions of understatement, civilised discourse and respect for reason.

- A small but growing group of dispossessed, indigenous parents whose schools are as a direct result of the multiracial dimension failing their children.

- The presence in the state education service of a growing number of teachers and advisers who, quite correctly, perceive the professional advantage of supporting the notion of the multi racial curriculum urged by the authorities, and of making colour and race significant, high profile issues in the classroom.

- The successful creation by the race relations lobby of a dubious, officially approved argot which functions to maintain a whole set of questionable beliefs and attitudes about education and race attitudes which have much more to do with professional opportunism than the educational progress of ethnic minority children.

I suspect that these elements, far from helping to produce harmony, are, in reality, operating to produce a sense of fragmentation and discord. And I am no longer convinced that the British genius for compromise, for muddling through, and for good natured tolerance will be sufficient to resolve the inevitable tensions.